I'm not a developer, so I can't confidently comment on the value of specific code evaluation techniques. In other disciplines however, it can often be fairly easy to sort out the talented folks from the merely competent through a brief screening and interview. The trouble with such a shortened interview process is it's inability to determine if this person will be a good fit with the company's culture and team. Similarly, it can be difficult for a prospective employee to make an informed decision as to whether or not he will actually enjoy working at that company.
You can make a very good case that these types of extensive, saturating interview processes do more to determine one's overall fit with the company than their role specific abilities. You could also argue that this is just as important an indicator of one's success with a company as their role specific abilities, assuming some sort of baseline level of competency.
One thing indicator I like use for "cultural fit" (as we don't have a lengthy interview process for our team) is how much the interviewee asks about our team. Are there any questions? A few generic questions? Or some deeper, probing questions about expectations, design decisions, framework decisions, and general culture? If I'm considering a new position, I want to know as much about my potential employer as they want to know about me.
You're going to run into some degree of issues wherever you go if you're accepting pre-orders. Because your essentially taking payments for a product that doesn't exist yet (and therefore may never exist - it's a possibility), paying customers may never receive what they order. If that happens, and you can't refund every single order, PayPal needs to cover your customers.
If you have a lot of cash on hand, have great credit, extensive positive history with other processors, etc., it will be easier for you to get going. Rather than being shut down like this author's business though, some merchant account providers may tell you they need to keep a rolling reserve of 5-10% with them for a period of time.
PayPal is horrible at providing support, documentation and resolution channels in these type of situations. They also, at times, can appear to arbitrarily take adverse action against certain accounts.
However, it's important to note that they hold the risk on these transactions. If the business goes under before pre-orders can be fulfilled, and the business doesn't have the funds to take care of all the chargebacks this event will cause, guess who pays out? PayPal. This scenario is the exception to be sure, but it happens with enough frequency that PayPal must implement some form of risk mitigation.
There could be other factors in play here, as well. Does the business have a poor history with other processors? Do the founders have poor credit? Maybe not, but maybe so. It's difficult to arrive at a concrete conclusion from this post. That being said, it's a possibility that PayPal has not assessed risk appropriately in this case. We simply can't tell.
Where PayPal could make situations like this better is by providing clear expectations up front as to how they assess risk, and what not to do with your account ahead of time. They could provide reasonable support to work with the merchant and get additional metrics / a better feel for the account. They could provide the above context to merchants when this happens. The best merchant account providers do this. PayPal fails spectacularly at the above, which is enough for businesses to strongly consider alternatives.
One issue is that a lot of these developers and small businesses fail to change their account type from Premium to Business. Doing so does not change any fees or features, it simply attaches a business name to the account instead of an individual's name, but it also changes the help UI and gives you access to the business support phone line. When there's an issue with a business account, PayPal actually calls you, in my experience. And when I call their phone line, a human being answered right away.
Samurai doesn't solve this problem. A merchant processing through them still needs to obtain a traditional merchant account, and therefore exposes their business to the same risk of having a reserve assessed on their account. If Feefighters is acting as an ISO (merchant account servicer / reseller), they can perhaps cushion the blow delivered to merchants in these cases, but likely not by much.
Stripe allows businesses to process on their merchant account, similar to how PayPal works. This removes the direct impact of a reserve, but if Stripe observes behavior that could increase their exposure to risk, I'm sure they will take action. It seems likely to me that Stripe will be more reasonable than PayPal in these instances, but that remains to be seen.
The difference will be if they're straight-forward with their customers and let them know of policies long enough before they're implemented so that they could plausibly leave the service if they disagreed. The problems with Paypal in the linked article were their refusal to discuss, especially beforehand.
Paypal, like EBay, (go figure) is an early entrant whose ubiquity has made them think they're successful on merit, and whose sheer size has kept competition away to re-enforce that image to themselves. As soon as a capable competitor steps up customers will flee these user-hostile companies.
You're missing my point regarding Samurai. It's main value prop is a gateway with developer friendly docs. This has nothing to do with risk.
Feefighters tells their customers to go with the absolute lowest priced merchant account provider because they are all the same otherwise. As this post points out, that's horrendously inaccurate.
Valid point, but if I am rich enough to be living on an isolated island micro-country, and will fetch a healthy enough ransom for pirates to snatch me, I am also investing a fair amount of resources into my own defense. Think small arms, ample security systems, security guards, etc.
You don't need to board the thing to take it ransom. Just need to have a credible threat of doing serious damage. "You have 5 minutes to wire $x into our bank account or your little country gets sunk."
To your point, someone used the Hubble Effect in the other HN thread on this story to show that this observation is actually closer to 9.5 billion years old, which is significantly different than it being 12 billion years old.
Given that the difference between our calculations is a result of the margin of error in determining the Earth's ocean's volume, I wonder what the margin of error is for NASA's measurement.
Age 9: Created a 'museum' in my bedroom comprised of all the interesting things I could collect (geodes, baseball cards, trophies, shark's teeth, etc.). I charged $.50 for admission.
Age 10: I made and sold various Origami pieces in school. Prices ranged from $.25 - $5. It became so busy and disruptive that at one point, the teacher instituted a classroom-wide ban on Origami.
Age 18: Created and sold hemp jewelry ranging from $15 - $50.
Age 25: Began freelancing graphic design / front end design. Made enough to live off of for about 18 months.
On my 27th birthday, I joined a profitable startup as the 10th employee. We're now very profitable, and have 33 employees.
You can make a very good case that these types of extensive, saturating interview processes do more to determine one's overall fit with the company than their role specific abilities. You could also argue that this is just as important an indicator of one's success with a company as their role specific abilities, assuming some sort of baseline level of competency.